Some of you may have seen that Apple have finally released a decent spec macbook.. the question is, for the price.. is it right for our profession?

I currently work as a network admin with the view to become a pen tester, and at the moment I don't have a portable rig.

The pricetag is massive (especially when you account for the fact it needs an extra £30 for a thunderbolt ethernet adapter) but the stats, for a mac are really impressive, with great resources for coding, cracking and footprinting at the same time. It even has a gorgeous retina display for watching movies in those long hotel stays.

The machine is clearly aimed at the photo/video editing market, but is it a viable option for us? has anyone here used a mac for pen testing/networking before?

It's worth mentioning that it would be a huge upgrade on my home and work pc.

Mac's are great computers. I'm not a super fan-boy but I do have one. I also have a windows and mint box at home too.

As far as pentesting goes, I'm sure its just fine - it's really going to come down to the right tool for the job and personal preference. I pentest from a windows host running a bt vm, it works great. I know other folks who use a mac as their host OS too. It really is up to you.

The only real issue you may want to consider is GPU cracking. Not sure what cards are in the Mac but that might be the only limiting factor. Someone else can probably verify if the GPU stuff works or not.

Do you want to run primarily from OS X? Or run a full time Linux distro? Other than that I have no argument against the Mac specs. Baseline, they've always raised the bar. If you have the cash, then go for it. I heard that some of the new MBPs have limitations on what can be replaced. Maybe it was just the Airs.

I have a MAcBook Pro from about a year and a half ago. It's a 2.8 GHz i7 with 8G of RAM. I run VMWare Fusion on it, and will have the host OS (OS X) and a couple of guests (usually BT5 and Win 7) and it runs just fine. When using as a virtual lab system I can add an XP system and an Ubuntu system or two, but I need to be careful with the memory allocation to each VM. Never used it to do much serious PW cracking, so I can't comment on that.

My MBP is mid-2009. Popped in a 1TB drive and maxed it out to 8GB. I run BT5 R2 on it with 2GB and it works without any issues. For serious password cracking though, I usually delegate that to a much more powerful machine. I'm not sure about the newer models.

Throw a SSD in a standard MBP, and it'll consistently outperform the MBP with Retina display, because so much processing power is used to drive the new display.

Since we still use wired networks, live CD's (at least two extra things you'd have to carry in your bag), etc, I wouldn't recommend the MBP w/ RD for any pen tester. Keep in mind that the RAM in the RD is soldered to the board (no upgrades) and the SSD is totally proprietary (unlikely/limited upgrades). If you want to upgrade in the future, standard MBP is the only way to go.

For reasons already mentioned, I love OSX as a pen testing platform. You get the power of *nix under the hood, which will compile a fair amount of software natively, you can go fink or macports for a wider selection of *nix utils, and of course you can run a VM for windows, BT, or any other x86 OS you might want to run.

Kind of the best of all the worlds, and (will this spark a firestorm?) IMHO OSX is infinitely more stable than windows, and that to me is worth something.

You'll never go wrong with extra RAM, especially if you want / need to lab something up, quick. $130 to go to 16 GB, if you have it to spend, is worth it. Also, as was previously noted, if you have extra funds, look into an SSD. Of the two, my extra money would be spent, there, for performance reasons, alone.

Good luck!

~ hayabusa ~

"All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved." - Sun Tzu, 'The Art of War'

A previous poster was correct that a lot of components are soldered to the board and can't be upgraded, but for £130 you can double up to 16gb, worth it?

I was thinking of using OSX host with virtual BT, are there any issues with that? I have a separate windows box for win tools and pure cracking, but this ofc isn't portable.

Fair point made by rance about power to the retina display.

The whole inability to upgrade the new line annoys me. In any case, as I mentioned, I run BT5R2 on VMware Fusion, no issues. I don't use VirtualBox, so I can't comment on that (work pays for the VMware license, so...).